Kate Fenton creates feisty heroines who'll
take on the world while burning the fish fingers and
doesn't assume that if you enjoy romance, you haven't got
a brain.
Maeve Haran in The Daily ExpressA work of ripe imagination, brilliant
command of writing, and a liberal topping of the feel good
factor.
The Chronicle

Once upon a time, Miss Theodora Dunstan
proposed marriage. More specifically, she proposed that the
MP for Tadstone West should stop piddling around and do the
decent thing by herself.

Readers of the tabloid press may recall
what happened next. Teddy prefers not to - although she wishes
to make clear she did not supply those Union Jack boxer shorts,
and was strongly tempted to raise the matter of the banana
with the Press Complaints Commission.

Two years on, she lives in North Yorkshire,
rather too close to the ancestral home for comfort, but that's
the least of her worries. Chief amongst them, at 37, is the
urgent need to get herself hitched. Forget romance. Two sprogs,
two dogs, four beds and six acres (negotiable) will do fine.
However, while this daughter of a hard-up baronet, sadly deceased,
and his sweetly sulphuric wife, sadly un-deceased, may toil
night and day in a steamy kitchen, Teddy is no Cinderella.
She just happens to run a catering business. And if she were
bird-brained enough to expect rescue from chinless Princes
or wand-waving menopausal matrons, she wouldn't be consulting
section H (for husbands) in her filing cabinet before despatching
invitations to the ball.

As for how she comes to be organizing this
ludicrously extravagant orgy for her barmy sister-in-law,
well, that's another story

footnote: AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES FAIRYTALE

I'm often asked how long it takes me to write a book. The truthful
answer is anything from nineteen days (my all time speed record,
see The Colours of Snow) to forever. But with those books
that have been a long time in gestation, I wasn't, of course, writing
continuously. Might not even have been putting words on paper for
months on end, just thinking. (Some people might call it slobbing
around, but there you go).

Take this book. By the time I actually completed it, I'd been toying
with the idea for a good six or seven years. Actually, not with
the story so much as with the character of Miss Theodora Dunstan.
This was between writing other books, naturally, but there are little
bundles of abandoned plots, sketches and scenes scattered all round
the attic labelled 'Teddy'. Over time, she became so real, I almost
found myself talking to her. (Only 'almost'. I haven't quite gone
over the edge yet). I was certainly aware that someone like her
would have precious little sympathy for a writer's travails. For
while disclaiming the remotest understanding of the creative process,
or any other such high-falutin' twaddle, she would undoubtedly suggest
that most problems, in her experience, responded to a combination
of common sense and good old fashioned elbow grease. And if, after
pulling up my socks and stiffening the jolly old sinews, I was still
floundering, she'd be inclined to ask whether I'd ever considered
an alternative career? Perhaps a nice steady day job that paid nice
steady money? Not that it was any concern of hers, she would hastily
add, because, sorry and all that, but she never touches fiction.
No time. Cook books and the obits page, that's her notion of a good
read.

Teddy is a certain sort of Englishwoman. No, let's be more specific
and less mealy-mouthed, a certain sort of (very) upper middle class
Englishwoman. You still find her kind widely distributed round the
English countryside. She is, quintessentially, a rural animal, although
her species also thrives - like foxes - in the better parts of London.
I don't recall encountering many Teddies when I was a child. They
were to be sighted round Oxford, though, at the beginnings and ends
of terms: those long-nosed, schoolgirl-complexioned mothers at the
wheels of hearse-like navy-blue Volvo estates, with a double string
of alarmingly hefty beads worn over an open-necked shirt, and Labrador
hairs all over their skirts, as they dumped or collected the one
of their brood who had (to the bewilderment of the family) turned
out to be rather brainy. But, when you're that age, parents are
parents and you barely spare them a thought.

Of course, the breed was much in evidence at the House of Commons,
during my brief tenure of employment for a Tory MP. Poor man. All
his colleagues were kept in rigorous A-Z filed order by one of these
gorgons ('heart of oak, vowels of glass, handbag of granite') in
their navy tights, gold-tipped courts, pie-crust frills, puffa jackets
and pearls. He had me. I hope that isn't why, twenty-whatever years
on, he languishes still on the back benches. Dippy, dizzy, in laddered
tights with a head stuffed full of musicals I was going to compose,
frocks I actually was making, and sexy novels I was surreptitiously
reading under the desk, I was frankly terrified of the Theodora
Dunstans of this world. They sized me up at a glance and assessed
(quite accurately) I wasn't up to the job. With characteristic bluntness,
and in accents that reminded me uncannily of HM the Queen, they
even told my hapless employer so. Although several felt duty-bound
to give this little slacker a helping hand. One, albeit not a wholly
typical model, went so far as to invite me round to supper in her
Battersea flat. Only recently, with a jolt, did I recognize that
this one-time secretary, after marrying a promising young MP, had
gone on to become none other than Christine Hamilton. Which makes
for a good conversation stopper at dinner parties.

Not until I moved up to North Yorkshire, though, did I encounter
the well-bred Englishwoman in her native habitat. Lot of 'em about
up here. In fact, it began to seem to me that the entire tattered
tapestry of rural life would split asunder if it weren't for these
energetic, foghorn-voiced matrons running jumble sales, arranging
flowers, adopting dogs, making jam, visiting hospitals, breeding
fancy chickens, rebuilding church towers, founding hat-making businesses
in defunct cow byres, letting the stately spare beds to American
tourists, and so on and on - and on. Organising is what they're
good at - other people's lives, as well as Safari suppers. Aunt
Constance, in Dancing to the Pipers, is definitely one of their
number. But while they're wonderfully wacky in what you might call
the smaller character roles, they're hardly natural casting as romantic
lead. We're talking love stories here - hearts, minds relationships.
And there's something daunting about a heroine who pooh-poohs all
such juvenile tomfoolery, and would no more analyse her emotional
health than operate on her own appendix. Teddy was very real to
me, but she remained a bit of a comedian.

Then came the night the late Princess of Wales fixed her beautiful
khol-ringed, tear-spangled eyes on us, as she confided her marital
troubles on BBC television. My own eyes were wet, too. Only I was
weeping from writhing, spine-curdling embarrassment as I buried
my head under the sofa cushions. 'How can you do it?' I wailed at
the telly. 'This is excruciating.'

'Have you no heart?' said my spouse sternly.

Because, here's an odd thing. The lad may be a generation older
than I. He fought in the last war (and I don't mean the Gulf), wears
an MCC tie, and calls people 'old chap' without a trace of irony.
But there's no question he's quite at home in this touchy-feely,
caring-sharing Diana world. Mind, he's an actor. Enough said. Me,
though, I'm one of the baby boomers for whom, supposedly, 'it's
good to talk' isn't an advertising slogan so much as a way of life,
a self-evident truth, a veritable credo. My self-centred generation
have been verbalizing our emotions for forty years. None of that
unhealthy old bottling-up for us, thank you very much. We let it
all hang out. Except

Was it only me who, after watching Panorama with a prune-face
worthy of Hattie Jacques playing matron, began to wonder whether
the much-mocked stiff British upper lip was quite such a joke after
all? Whether discretion, if not the better part of valour precisely,
was No Bad Thing? Maybe there was something to be said for a heroine
who would no more bare her soul than her breasts. Better still,
suppose this female had already done the latter, in the pages of
a tabloid newspaper? The plot began to take shape

What made it fun for me, though, was coming up with the pantomime
element. Not just did it give me enormous pleasure playing complicated
plot games with the Cinderella story, the whole tradition of pantomime
is so entirely and appropriately British. What other institution
more perfectly encapsulates the eccentricities of the national character?
It might have been designed to confirm all Johnny Foreigner's darkest
suspicions about our national love life.

Oh no it doesn't

Oh yes it jolly well does. Come on, let's be honest: we Brits just
don't get high romance, do we? Consider Cinderella. A Frenchman,
Charles Perrault, sets down this charming, rags-to-riches fairy
story; Rossini, being Italian, naturally transforms it into a glittering
opera while the likes of Prokofiev compose the grandest of grand
Russian ballets. And what's our Great British cultural take? Smutty
jokes, custard pies and rampant transvestitism. Men in tights? Men
in balloon-stuffed bras and corsets, more like. With the girls in
spike-heeled, thigh-high boots. Kinky or what? Sure, sure, there's
a love story in there somewhere. But we all know that while Cinders
and Prince Charming (in fishnets) are warbling the obligatory soppy
duet, little Thomas will be climbing under his seat and Emma demanding
to go to the toilet, as we grown-ups yawn and pass round the Liquorice
Allsorts. We're all waiting for the Ugly Sisters to reappear and
return us to the serious business of the evening: having a good
laugh.

So it's in the light of this interesting insight to the British
psyche, I saw the plot of Too Many Godmothers: an equal opportunities
fairytale, with all roles fairly redistributed across the sexes.
Teddy, of course, informed me that the whole idea was totally potty,
and washed her hands of me while she hurried away to resume running
her business, bullying her family, arranging the church flowers
and plotting how to get her thug of a neighbour dislodged from next
door